Friday a Swiss firm announced a major cybersecurity initiative that uses a solution called SensorsID to protect Internet of Things connected devices.
The news comes out of Zug, Switzerland, an area widely known as “Crypto Silicon Valley.” Swiss startups are running out ahead in developing various blockchain-related initiatives and WISeKey promises to be one that’s relevant to a quickly growing field.
In a press release announcing the firm’s new blockchain digital identity solution, WISeKey cites a Gartner estimate that the world will see 20 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things by next year – and 1 trillion devices by 2022.
With that in mind, WISeKey works to install something called “Root of Trust” (RoT) that will combine dual factor authentication and a blockchain device identity system to make sure that data transactions are authentic and traceable.
In the announcement, company spokespersons ask readers to imagine intelligent cars or homes with automated maintenance logs, event tracking and much more.
These types of innovations are just part of what the Internet of Things promises to bring to our lives – and WISeKey’s SensorsID offering may well be one of the foundational cybersecurity tools designed to keep the IoT working in the ways that we want to without allowing black hat outsiders to disrupt or compromise systems.
“Today, people use IoT devices to brew their coffee in the morning, turn off the lights before going to bed, and track how active they are on a typical day — and those cases are just a sampling of consumer use cases,” wrote Kayla Matthews in IT For All in October of 2018. “Many users don’t practice basic Internet security rules, such as setting strong passwords and performing software updates. Hardware manufacturers are some of the worst culprits … IoT enthusiasts often don’t see the harm in their casual approach to device security. But, as the examples above demonstrate, hackers are already accustomed to techniques that cause devastating damage, and they’ll likely continue to outsmart device manufacturers and owners until security gets prioritized—and standardized—across the entire industry.”
The company’s RoT is already installed in billions of devices, but this new announcement shows how companies will serve the need for digital authentication and data protection in the digital age as the IoT continues to bloom.
“Combined with the Application Microcontroller in the IoT Edge Device, the VaultIC Secure Element brings premium security level. WISeKey Secure Elements are dedicated to providing secure storage and usage of sensitive assets,” write company analysts. “WISeKey chips are built with unique features able to secure storage, cryptographic calculations and digital signatures, and are specifically designed to execute sensitive calculations, without leaking information such as power consumption patterns or electromagnetic emissions to the outside world. The data is stored deep down within the protected memory of the chips, which are designed with unique capabilities not to allow other software to run on them and are equipped with various hardware sensors and protection mechanisms making them resistant to hardware attacks.”
